Market Structure and Firm Practices in Farm Supply Retailing: the Problem of Equitable Treatment

The theoretical basis for this study is the proposition that certain measurable attributes of market structure are strategic variables determining competitive behavior in farm supply retailing and the performance of price as a guide to optimum use of marketing resources.The immediate practical problem is to discover opportunities to better coordinate the decision of sellers (retail firms) and buyers (farmers) of commercial fertilizer, prepared animal feed and petroleum products to more nearly achieve optimum efficiency in retailing and the equitable treatment of large and small farmers. Empirical data are obtained from participants on both sides of key farm supply markets, from a sample of 190 Nebraska farmers stratified by size of farm, and from samples of 119 retail firms located in one-fourth to one-half of the estimated 100-135 farm supply markets in Nebraska. One of the major findings of this study is that in farm supply markets with few sellers and many buyers, uniform or flat prices generally prevail.The findings suggest that most farmers are not free to choose between a pricing system that encourages small volume buying at higher costs, or one in which economic incentives encourage larger volume buying at lower costs.For this reason it is misleading to infer from the widespread practice of uniform pricing that farmers are willing to pay prices which cover the added costs of these practices in retailing in order to conduct farming operations with a minimum of on-farm storage facilities and inventory capital, or in order to realize a degree of plurality in brand and dealer preference.Most farmers have no choice. Advisor: Richard G. Wals

Idioms: Humans or Machines, It’s All About Context

Expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretation depending on the context they occur in (“sales hit the roof” vs “hit the roof of the car”). Previous studies suggest that idiomaticity is not a binary property, but rather a continuum or the so-called “scalar phenomenon” ranging from completely literal to highly idiomatic. This paper reports the results of an experiment in which human annotators rank idiomatic expressions in context on a scale from 1 (literal) to 4 (highly idiomatic). Our experiment supports the hypothesis that idioms fall on a continuum and that one might differentiate between highly idiomatic, mildly idiomatic and weakly idiomatic expressions. In addition, we measure the relative idiomaticity of 11 idiomatic types and compute the correlation between the relative idiomaticity of an expression and the performance of various automatic models for idiom detection. We show that our model, based on the distributional semantics ideas, not only outperforms the previous models, but also positively correlates with the human judgements, which suggests that we are moving in the right direction toward automatic idiom detection

A Dynamic and Informative Intelligent Survey System Based on Knowledge Graph

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